The Israelis are building a fence to separate themselves from the Palestinians. However, walls do not make peace when conflict is the natural end product of human activity.

Any Israeli or Palestinian should be able to infer this from viewing the last remaining wall of a temple built 2000 years ago. It’s a catalog of civilizations that tried to live in Jerusalem forever. When viewing the wall, the bottom stones were from the original builders.

The next higher courses are from the group that conquered them. Then, when this second group was driven out part of the wall was knocked down, and rebuilt by the third owners. In the tapestry of stone courses is a record of no less than five civilizations. If the same social design exists, the present owners will not hold the wall for long.

To change this progression requires that each member of the present group and each member of the group’s neighbors pay a price. It is a price so high that in the past no person was willing to pay it.

After September 11th, when conditions are harsh, expectations of future conditions are harsher, and past solutions appear weaker, people may view paying the price as less expensive than enduring the expected hardship.

To understand how this price leads to peace consider this experiment. Draw a boundary around a group of people. Create a nation whose border is closed to immigration. Divide the nation into two states. Control the border between the two states so people can emigrate out of "state 1" but not immigrate into it unless they are replacing people who have left.

The price for living in "state 1" is that each person parents only one child. There are no special costs for living in "state 2." After having a second child in "state 1," everyone in the family must emigrate to "state 2" which must accept them. State 1 will accept 3 immigrants from state 2 to replace them.

Implementation: After the boundary of the nation is drawn, people inside that boundary decide if they want to pay the price.

Those that can or are willing to pay move to "state 1" and those with two or more children or are not willing to pay move to "state 2." The size of "state 1 and 2" are adjusted so each person has about what they had before the move. The "payers" and "non-payers" do not share a common environment.

World governments, who are running this experiment, as an alternative to the costs of endless conflict, pay the dislocation losses and the moving expenses. They build and man a protection fence around the nation and between the states.

We will have to run the experiment to see what would happen. However, theoretically in state 1, the rapid population decline, caused by paying the price, should produce a doubling of resources per capita every 30 years simply by inheritance.

At this rate, well being should increase 4 to 8 times during a lifetime. At this rate of improvement, people might rather wait for things to get better than fight to make them better. If so, the state with rapidly decreasing population will move toward peace. The state with constant or increasing populations will move toward conflict.